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Livin'
With The Sims:
theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims,
asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual
life where everyone is Swedish?"

Anything
I say comes from me and represents my personal opinions, views and subtle
plans for influencing society. Read, ruminate over and remember at your
own risk. If I teach you something and it helps, teach someone else.

ew
modelers often ask me for advice about this that or the other concerning
their model and I usually tell them to send it and let me take a look.
My basic criticisms usually run along the lines of a need for a better
understanding of anatomy, less polys (or more polys in specific
areas), but the most prevalent thing that comes up with a rookie model
is ‘making it count’.

By ‘making it count’ I mean
every vertex, every face and every edge has to serve a purpose. If it
doesn’t delineate or define a part of the geometry then it needs to
GO. In low-poly modeling this is a very important theory to understand.
It applies to not only model integrity it applies to optimization and
animation as well.

Look at and compare the following
two pics:

The differences when you
first look aren’t much but they’re there. The shoulders are pretty much
identical but look at arm 1 and arm 3 (front and back) in both pics.

The ‘before’ arm doesn’t
have much variation in it’s outline. All the arm views show a lack of
a huge amount of variation but these in particular show the difference.
What I’m trying to drive home here is to use the lines to create
interest in the model and make them crucial to the geometry.

Now compare arm 2 in both
images…

Not only is the ‘before’
arm lacking in a strong outline variety it has an extraneous vertex
above the wrist that divides the edge there. In arm 4 there’s too many
divisions along the forearm near the front of the elbow juncture…